Graphic Design Professional.

Quickform: Minimal Logo

Quickform is a very short and quick write up of my thoughts about some interesting design, design news, and the field itself.

Twitter is in the process of reimagining and revamping their site and app to make it more “conversational context-driven” and encouraging better quality conversations between us users. During this early phase, Twitter has created a beta to test this and to gain feedback but one of the more interesting aspects of this is their new logo or the lack of a logo for its beta app. The logo is just a square icon with the color blue. I know the “No Logo” is a representation of the blue sky and thinking as the revamping is a Work-In-Progress. To me, Twitter’s “No Logo” is interesting because it got me thinking about if this a viable option for companies? I think the biggest downside of having a “No Logo” is that color is not copyrightable so many other companies could just copy it. Companies with a Trademark of a specific color like Target with their red, Reese’s with their orange, and T-Mobile with their magenta will have some protection. But it wouldn’t protect Target from another company simply using a red that not Target’s red or if that company is not in the same industry kind of like Coca-Cola. Imagine all of your apps having similar colors to one another and no identifying marks it would get confusing to navigate and pick the app that you want. That type of confusion is another downside to a “No Logo” if it’s become a trend.

What’s more viable is an extreme paring down of a logo/symbol to the most minimalistic form it can have and still be recognized that company or brand. The concept is not new but I think this minimalistic form could be viable for certain type of companies with very strong brand recognition. Companies like Coca-Cola, Apple, McDonald’s, Amazon, Google, Target, and etc could take it very far. Especially as a form of brand differentiation of setting themselves apart from their competitors by relying on the rich brand equity they have with customers. For example, Currently, McDonald’s have a campaign that plays around with their brand recognition in Puerto Rico by blurring some of their products such as the Happy Meals in their advertising relying on the people to recognize it. This is meant to be a contrast to the fast food industry standard selling. I don’t think brand recognition is the only factor that would make that work. Take Target and Wal-Mart for instance, They both have really strong brand recognition and equity but I suspect that Target can take the route of extremely paring down their logo and not Wal-Mart. For example, Target could reduce the logo to the point of just having a red dot and white background as a form of differentiation. That dot would still represent the brand as a target (to aim at) and people would know that is Target (stores). It helps that Target is already minimalistic with its aesthetics and identity but I think the other main factors of why they could pull it off is that design itself is a priority for Target from the corporate level down to the store level and how that plays into a unifying customer experience. With Wal-Mart that’s not the case, their lower priority for design in the interest of having the lowest prices and getting high sales lead into a mixed bag of experiences that people have in store with Wal-Mart. For example, Site to Store Pick Up and Grocery Pick Up areas have orange and yellow to differentiate it from the rest of the store. While it makes sense for the Site to Store Pick Up area to appear different for customers to find quickly to get their stuff and take off, it creates a mixed signal dissonance of feeling like its 2 different stores of an Orange Wal-Mart store and a Blue Wal-Mart store. Even the associates that work in Site to Store wear orange and yellow. Wal-Mart currently can not pull off an extreme pared down logo unless it goes through a company-wide shift of prioritizing design and focusing on creating a unifying positive experience for the customer. Even though I don’t think it’s viable to have a “No Logo” it would be cool and interesting to me to see a trend towards extreme minimalistic logos and symbols.